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This past weekend I brought about 10 students to the 2013 Lehigh Valley Tech Hackathon. The event brings together designers, developers, and engineers with the goal of creating a “product” at the end of the weekend. On Friday everyone was able to pitch an idea and we formed teams. I ended up on a team with 4 of my Kutztown students: Kyle Desimone, Jerry Cavill, Kory Walton and Trevor Dilg, and 2 friends Ryan Hickey & Donna Chastain. Our concept was absurd, we wanted to create an interactive application and physical objects around the theme of the brilliant 90’s cartoon Captain Planet. The gist of the cartoon is that 5 Planeteers have power rings and when they come together they summon Captain Planet, who according to wikipedia has the following powers:

Weather and climate manipulation

Ability to generate and control earth, fire, wind and water

Near invincibility

Mullet

Invisibility

Telepathy

Flight

Super strength

Team Captain Planet:

To make our Captain Planet concept come to life, we decided to build a series of ridiculous elements which included custom 3D printed rings fitted with RGB LEDs controlled by an arduino, a capacitive touch ring powered by a makey makey, a servo controlled captain planet head that moved up and down, a website that tracked the captain, a text message calling tree that alerts users when the captain is activated (powered by nexmo, which is awesome by the way), and a Processing sketch that ties everything together.

So first the rings. They were modeled in Lightwave 3D, and were hollowed out to allow space for the LED which sticks out through the opening in the top. The file was converted to an STL and printed on a 3D printer at the Northampton Fab Lab. Download the STL and print your own Captain Planet ring!

The next step in the process was to wire the RGB LEDs to a an arduino that would power and control the lights when triggered. The sketch waits for a serial data (sent from Processing), parses it and lights the appropriate LEDs with our selected colors (and blink sequences). Download the aduino sketch.

Using some hobby servo motors we also were able to make a cardboard captain planet and control his head motion, but during the 40 or 50 tests of the process we burnt-out the servos, leaving a lifeless captain planet mascot full of broken electronics:

The final step was to bring it all together in Processing. The makey makey read physical input and sent it to a computer as keyboard input, so we mapped different inputs to keys and had Processing listen for those keys. We wrapped a wire around the front of the rings so it could detect the presence of another person when touched (because humans conduct electricity):

The next piece was the Processing sketch (download it) which waited for “keyboard input” from the makey makey, when it received input it triggered a video to play (corresponding to the appropriate Planeteer), send a message to the arduino to light the appropriate LEDs, and then waited for the next input. When all 5 Planeteers had been activated, the full one minute long captain planet theme song & video was displayed, and all the rings pulsed random light colors. After the video ended all the users in the system received a text message alert and data was added to the Captain Planet Locator, which is programmed with PHP a simple mySQL database.

The whole event was a ton of fun, and we were all out of our comfort zones for the whole project. We knew from the beginning that the project was ridiculous, but we had a great time making it. We didn’t win (which is total BS), but the winning team totally deserved it, so we weren’t bitter (great job Joe Fritz and team!).

I’m a little late posting this, but earlier this month I lead a Processing lecture at Lehigh Valley Tech. I went over the basics of what Processing can create and some simple programming examples, including a drawing app that reacts to audio input and a generative art piece that infinitely draws circles.